


Chasing the Eclipse

by WardenCommanderCousland



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: C-Sec, Gen, Major Original Character(s), Minor Shepard/Garrus Vakarian, Normandy Crew Cameos, Post-War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-05-10 00:30:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 21,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14726544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WardenCommanderCousland/pseuds/WardenCommanderCousland
Summary: Twenty years after the Reaper war, Jona Sederis has escaped the Citadel and resumed her role as the head of Eclipse. Determined to prevent a bloodbath, C-Sec enlists rookie agent Ashley Shepard, daughter of the legendary war hero, to infiltrate the mercenary organization and take the bloodthirsty asari down.Rating for language and sexuality. Tags subject to change.





	1. Chapter 1

They say every great war has its heroes. If they’re lucky, if everything goes right, they become that embarrassing old hero that everyone gets tired of. They win the day, go home, get married, raise a family, and live off the royalties from the vids. And some days, they get bored and shoot beer cans off the top of the Presidium.

Which is why I was spending the end of my shift convincing my father to stop doing that exact thing.

“Dad, you have to get down from here,” I said as I climbed out of my C-Sec patrol car. “There’s 138 regulations against it.”

My father tossed another can in the air and pulled sniper rifle’s trigger, without even bothering with the scope. The round tore a perfect hole through the can, the Citadel’s late afternoon sun streaming through the rupture. “They’ve added one since the last time I looked,” he said, retracting the gun and setting it on the buttress beneath his feet.

“Shockingly, it’s called the Garrus Vakarian rule.” I said, trying to contain my irritation. I checked my omnitool. Dammit, I was going to be late for handover if he didn’t get moving. “Now, will you please stop systemically ruining my career? And how did you even get up here?” There were no other cars parked on the buttress, for once.

Garrus Vakarian, son of the Primarch of Palaven, war hero, and purveyor of the worst dad jokes in the galaxy, popped open of the remaining beers and offered the other to me. I refused it; I still had a half hour to go in my shift and I was already pushing my luck. He took a long swig before saying, “your mother dropped me off on her way to her monthly argument with the Council.” 

Of course she did. Because otherwise she'd be right up here with him. I crossed my arms and drummed my fingers against my elbow, watching him polish off the can. He tossed the empty can in his hand, up and down a few times to get a bearing of the weight. Then, in one fluid motion he lobbed it, kicked the gun up to his hands, opened the sniper rifle and took another shot without pausing to aim the scope. The can broke in two and sailed down to the ponds below. He turned to grin at me, "I still got it."

“Dad,” I repeated. I’d been on shift for nearly ten hours. I wanted to turn in my patrol reports and take a shower. And now I was definitely going to be late for handover. “We have to go. Now.”

“All right, all right.” He slung the rifle over his shoulder and picked up the sack of beer cans with his free hand. “Just drop me at a Rapid Transit station. I’ll meet you at home.”

I shook my head as I re-entered my patrol car. “I have an early shift tomorrow. I was just going to stay in C-Sec housing tonight.”

Most humans think turians are emotionless, hard to read. Either I understand them more, having a turian father and brother, or Dad’s just more expressive than most. Either way, I caught the plainly skeptical look on his face in the rearcam. “Really, Dad. I have an 00:00 report time.”

“I believe you, Ash.” The glow from his omnitool lit up the back of my car as I drove towards C-Sec’s main command office, my home base. “You do have to come home tomorrow, though.”

I parked the car and popped the door. “Yeah, yeah I know. Ravi’s on shore leave. Don’t worry, I’ll be there for the big family reunion.” I winced at the shadow hovering over the hood of my car.

“Well, hopefully you’ll be on time for that, Shepard,” Executor Bailey said, casually checking the time on his omnitool. “Case handover started three minutes ago.”

“At ease, Executor,” my father said, climbing out of the backseat. He ruffled my hair. The resulting tangle was going to be obnoxious to comb out. “She was apprehending miscreants on the Presidium architecture.”

Bailey laughed, slapping Dad on the shoulder. “You know, we had to name a new rule after you after the fourth or fifth time we chased you down from there.” He took Dad's hand and shook it, leaning into the old familiarity shared between men who've gone through hell together. 

I nodded and quickly headed for my desk. As soon as I was in range of my computer, I began uploading all my case reports from my omnitool, so that by the time I hit the chair I just had to sign and submit. My relief, an asari named Nala, was drumming her fingers on the desktop as I approached. I waved my omnitool over the computer screen, transmitting my signature onto each case report. She snorted as I gestured to the chair, unofficially handing over my work to her.

“You better make the most of the next ten hours,” she called as I headed towards C-Sec housing. “I’m not going to wait on you again.”

“You can count on it,” I muttered, nearly crashing into a drell officer. “Excuse me.” 

~

C-Sec provides something between an apartment and a hotel for officers working overtime on cases, or those who only have less than 15 hours between shifts. It’s rare, with rookies working ten-hour beats, but it happens. People need to switch, someone needs vacation coverage. Sometimes someone who normally lives with her parents needs privacy when the Orbital Patrol changes over, so that said parents don’t catch their daughter with a man’s head between her thighs.

OK, that last case is probably just me. And I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad wouldn’t care if I brought Finch home. If they knew he existed. 

Something that Finch was starting to get annoyingly insistent about. He cornered me as I got out of the shower, still naked himself. “You know, Ash, we’ve been doing this for more than four months now. That’s well into the ‘meet the parents’ range.”

‘This’ was me sleeping with him every time he got shore leave. Orbital Patrols, a collaboration between all the council races' military arms, spend a week in orbit around the Citadel, then get a week off. I met Finch Wray when I hauled a few of his buddies out of the Presidium’s fountains and into the C-Sec drunk tank. He’d come to bail them out. Soon, he was coming to bail any Alliance patrol, and asking for “that cute redhead” whenever he did.

Then he just started coming to me directly.

Without a doubt, my parents have worked out that I always end up with short shift turnarounds whenever the Orbital Patrol turns over their crews. But they haven’t asked to meet the mysterious boyfriend or girlfriend.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, reaching around him for a towel. My pale skin looked nearly translucent pressed against his dark brown arms, blue and red trails crisscrossing my body just below the surface.

Finch tried to kiss my forehead, but I dodged it. “Come on, I promise I’ll behave. I won’t completely fawn over the great Commander Shepard.” 

I really need to change my last name. Thankfully, my parents had the sense to not stick me with the painfully long Shepard-Vakarian hyphenation they originally considered, but being a human with the last name Shepard was enough for questions by itself. And then they come to find that, yes, as in _that_ Shepard, Alliance Admiral and director of the N7 program, first human Spectre, hero of the goddamn galaxy. Yes, I know I look nothing like her. It’s because I, like so many other people my age, am adopted. You’d think more people would simply expect that, given the number of war orphans the Reapers left in their wake. And, you know, that whole "my father is a turian" thing. 

Unless they believe the rumor that I'm a secret lovechild between my mother and Commander Alenko. That one went around for a few years.

 “We’ve been over this,” I said pointedly, toweling my hair. “I don’t think we’re at that point yet.”

Finch crossed his arms and leaned against the bathroom wall. “Ash, please. I’ve been telling my mom all about you.

“You know nothing about me except that I work for C-Sec and really like how you look naked.”

“Ashley.”

I hung the towel. “No. Not yet.”

"Fine." 

Finch was dressed and gone before my head hit the pillow.


	2. Chapter 2

I actually like taking the first shift, even if it means starting off with the drunk tank. When I arrived back at the desk, Nala was sealing the warded doors on two rambunctious turians singing some platoon anthem horribly off-key. She rolled her eyes when she noticed me.

“Here, deal with the brat in cell two,” she said, handing me a datapad.

“I’m not on for ten more minutes,” I argued.

“Yeah, well, she asked for you and won’t talk to anyone else.”

Goddammit. That could only mean one person. It would be faster to just call her parents, not deal with her myself. I glanced down at the datapad, sighed, and headed for cell two, dragging my feet. A quarian was stretched out on the cot, sound asleep. Mala’Reegar nar Citadel, daughter to the quarian ambassador and self-appointed princess of the Citadel. At sixteen, she’d developed the reputation of asari socialites more than twice her mother’s age. Most of whom she ran around with.

Using my personal communicator instead of a C-Sec phone, I keyed in the quarian embassy’s residential line. “Please let Uncle Kal pick up. Please,” I prayed to no one in particular.

No such luck. The quarian ambassador herself answered the call, unsuited and blinking. “Hi, Aunt Tali.”

“Ashley, it's after midnight,” she said sleepily, rubbing her eyes. I was dying to know how they managed to simulate Rannoch’s environment in the embassy, so that the ambassador and her family could go unsuited in their apartment, but I'd never even been inside. “What’s going on?”

I angled my omnitool to show her the teenager passed out in the cell. “Mala’s here. She was picked up in Zakera Ward for drunk and disorderly.”

“Keelah,” Tali’Zorah vas Rannoch sighed. “We’ll be over shortly.”

“Let her stew in there,” Kal’Reegar muttered in the background. A shadow flipped behind Aunt Tali as he pulled a pillow over his head.

Tali turned to look off screen. “What if she gets sick?”

“A hangover won't kill her, and maybe she’ll learn something. We’ll pick her up in the morning.” The call clicked off, leaving me once again staring at the sleeping quarian. A yawn echoed from inside Mala's envirosuit and she rolled over. I grabbed a blanket to cover her. As long as her suit wasn't punctured, she'd probably be fine.

The intake of the Presidium’s overly drunken revelers tapered off around the same time that the Citadel’s artificial sunlight began breaking through the windows. Most were collected within an hour of their arrival, but some, like Mala, were left to sober up until the hours shifted solidly into day.

Managing the drunk tank wasn’t my favorite job, but it was steady work and made the hours pass. I hadn’t spent enough time in any unit to identify where I’d ultimately like to end up, but I’d toyed with the idea of being a detective like Grandfather had been. That was years away though. Until then, I’d toil in the relative obscurity of being a C-Sec rookie.

Or as much obscurity as one could have until one’s own extremely famous and immediately recognizable mother strolls into the station. Commander Shepard draws everyone’s attention, and unfortunately ignoring her makes me stand out even more. But there she was, dressed in her Alliance officer uniform, hair more grey than black these days, but eyes still sharp, and the faint outline of scars, the souvenirs of her Cerberus rebuild, etched on her cheek. 

Executor Bailey greeted her immediately, joined by the drell officer I’d seen at the end of my last shift. My mother didn’t even look my way, which was fine. I kept my head down and continued entering in the last of my reports, now even more eager to see the end of my shift.

My omnitool pinged. “I’m working,” I said as I relayed the call up to my comm.

“Yeah, but the way I hear it you’re about to not be.” I grinned at the sound of my brother’s voice. While the turian military didn’t restrict their troops from calling home, Ravi was pretty bad about letting us know he was still alive and calls from him were a rare treat.  “Mom and Dad are working, and I’m bored. Come hit the Strip with me."

I laughed as I started entering my signature on my reports. “You’ve been home all of what, ten minutes?”

“Twenty.”

“I’ll be home soon,” I said, killing the comm. Now all I had to do was wait for my relief to show up.

In the Executor’s office, overlooking my work station, I could hear voices rising. The reflection of a vidcomm flashed on the window. My mother’s voice was getting louder, more frustrated. Whatever Executor Bailey was suggesting to her, she wasn’t buying it. Really not buying it.

A silent crowd was forming in the office, trying to eavesdrop on the argument. I felt a gloved turian talon tap my arm and nearly jumped out of my skin. I turned to see my brother standing behind me, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. “If you’d spent two more seconds on the comm, you would have known I was coming by.” He looked up and asked, “What’s got Mom so bent out of shape?”

An officer nearby filled him in: “A long-term prisoner escaped C-Sec custody yesterday. I’m guessing the Executor wants a Spectre to get involved.”

“Why do they need a Spectre?” I asked. I waved my hand around the room to add, “We’ve got more than enough agents here to go after an inmate.”

“If they’ve gone off-station, a Spectre will have more authority for re-capture than C-Sec,” the officer continued, shrugging. “It’s currently on need-to-know only, and if Detective Krios is involved, it’s going to stay that way.”

“Krios?” I’d heard the name before but couldn’t place it.

“The drell. He’s the acting head of Organized Crime and has been overseeing all O-Crime’s undercover operations.”

The doors to the Executor’s office slid open, causing the crowd to hush further. A tinkling alarm overhead alerted everyone gathered that it was shift change, causing a rush to work stations as officers clocked in or out. Executor Bailey and his guests slipped by largely unnoticed, but Mom caught my and Ravi’s eyes as she passed and shook her head. As with many things relating to my mother, this was probably not going to be a topic of discussion.

Ravi waited while I changed into civilian clothes and locked away my service pistol for the day. I found him flirting with a female turian officer I recognized from E-Crimes.

I wrapped my arm around him possessively. “I thought you were going to spend time with me,” I said, pulling him towards me.

The officer shook her head and rolled her eyes. I know, I’m a bitch, but my brother has two weeks of shore leave to seduce women. He can spend a few hours with his sister.

“I hate you,” he said once we were out. I could feel the pressure of his claws pressing between his gloves and my arm, the unspoken marker of his irritation.

“I know.” I pushed my way through the Presidium’s mid-morning crowds: shoppers on errands, breakfasters whose meals were now solidly in brunch territory, various galactic races’ service members on shore leave. I reached the rapid transit station and summoned a cab to the Silversun Strip. “Why’d you come all the way out here anyway just to go back home with me?”

Ravi lowered the bag to his feet and stretched out his arms and back, nearly hitting an asari with a small infant in tow. “I told you, I’m bored. I brought the bag thinking we could take your C-Sec gear and hit the arena.”

I sighed. “I can’t take my C-Sec pistol with me on personal time, and I haven’t been issued a hardsuit yet. I’ve been renting gear from the arena since I left the Alliance.”

Ravi’s laugh always reminded me of the dogs on Earth, a sharp bark that grabbed the attention of everyone around him. “I thought the point of sending you to Grissom was so you wouldn’t ever need a hardsuit. Or were the rumors of your biotic abilities greatly exaggerated? Can you even lift a toothbrush with that amp, Shepard?”

I punched his shoulder as the cab pulled up. Ravi spent the drive to our home district telling me about his last assignment, raiding a batarian slave ship fresh from the Terminus systems.

My brother took to the military far better than I ever did, and why shouldn’t he? He’s turian. It’s practically imprinted on them from birth. Dad took Ravi to register for his mandatory service on his sixteenth birthday and he shipped out less than a month later. He’s been in ever since, happy as a krogan with a shotgun.

Armax Arsenal Arena was having an anniversary event, and playing vids of record-setting runs on the vidscreen over the entrance. As we pulled up, the screen flicked over to reveal three familiar forms facing off against the arena’s synthesized geth: Mom, Dad, and Aunt Tali. I shook my head. My parents’ names are still fairly high on the all-time leaderboard, though over the years they were surpassed by others who had more time, and as my parents aged, more skills.

That isn’t to say that they don’t still play. The arena is a three-minute walk from our apartment. Ravi and I were both taught to shoot here.

“Names?” the VI front desk attendant asked.

“Registered Combatants Ravilius Vakarian and Ashley Shepard.”

The VI flickered briefly before raising the gate to admit us, repeating her familiar pre-programmed instructions indicating where to find rental equipment, combatant dressing rooms, and simulation setup. We ignored her. We’d both heard this hundreds of times.

As I was dressing, Ravi flicked through the sim setup screens. “Wanna face some Reapers?”

“No. I like sleeping.” I shuddered, recalling the one time I let him talk me into facing them. It was one of the first times we went by ourselves. I had screaming nightmares about banshees for weeks. Ravi winced every time Mom and Dad looked at him for a month. “Put up geth. I feel like tossing some robots around like rag dolls.”


	3. Chapter 3

“So, there we are, about to finally take out who we _think_ is the ringleader when we get radioed by the ship saying that we’ve got the wrong gang entirely,” Ravi shook his head, stabbing his food to emphasis his relayed frustration. “Turns out they’re just red sand smugglers, not the slavers we thought we’d been casing for months.”

Dad snorted, making a derisive comment about Alliance intelligence. Mom shot him a look that he ignored. It felt good to have Ravi home again, having the four of us around the table. Most days now it was just me and Dad, if I ate with anyone at all. Mom had been spending more time on Earth recently, preparing to finalize her final transition out of the N7 directorship.

“Anyway, I’m glad I have enough time off to come home,” Ravi stopped for a second, casting a halfway guilty glance at Dad. “Not that I don’t enjoy spending time on Palaven, and it’s great to stay with Grandfather and Aunt Solana in Cipritine, but I missed the Citadel.”

Before any of us could respond, Glyph flickered into view, hovering over the table. Mom tried to dismiss him, reminding the drone that it was family time. It bobbed once and continued. “Admiral, Executor Bailey and Detective Krios from C-Sec are outside the door. The detective says he has an appointment.”

Mom closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “They’re early.” She pushed back from the table and headed to the front door. As she disengaged the lock, I could hear a familiar chirping begin, one that was quickly silenced by a muffled “I heart Garrus” and a chuckle from my father.

“Mom?” I called after her. Dad, Ravi and I pushed back from the table and followed to the foyer, where Krios and Bailey were handing their coats to Mom. A strikingly beautiful human woman I didn’t recognize hung behind them, as though she was already eager to leave.

Dad was right behind me, and pushed past to shake the drell’s hand. “Good to see you again, Kolyat. And you, Ori.”

Ravi began flicking through messages on his omnitool’s haptic screen. “Are we done with dinner? Because I might have a date…” he trailed off as he caught our parents’ eyes. Mom rolled her eyes and waved my brother off with her hand.  He turned and shuffled down the hall towards his bedroom. I made a move to follow but Bailey’s cough stopped me. “Officer Shepard, you’ll need to hear this,” he said.

I from him to my parents. Mom looked resigned; she knew what was coming. Based on Dad’s reaction though, she hadn’t told him what was about to happen. His eye was flicking back and forth rapidly through the haptic display on his visor, probably scanning recent newsfeeds to figure out why exactly the Executor was in our apartment.

While my parents and our guests filled in around the couch, I hung back and sat on the stair to the sunken living room, studying the human Dad called Ori. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her. Like I’d seen her before, a long time ago. She was visibly uncomfortable with the situation.

Executor Bailey nodded towards Glyph, who was still glowing faintly in the kitchen doorway. “Silence your info drone. I’m sure the Shadow Broker already knows what’s going on, but they aren’t going to be privy to this conversation.”

Dad waved his omnitool at the drone. It went dark, though it continued to hover in the doorway. I frowned, watching the drone bob. My parents always joked that Glyph was spying on them on behalf of the Shadow Broker, and used it as a half-hearted threat against my brother’s and my youthful mischief. But how was Bailey in on the joke? 

“Admiral, as we discussed earlier, Jona Sederis escaped C-Sec custody early yesterday, and we’ve received intel that she’s already left the station. Councilor Tevos has been, unsurprisingly, tight-lipped about the situation, though we don’t believe she had any involvement in the matter.” Bailey glanced at Detective Krios, who nodded, before proceeding. “We believe she has returned to Illium for the time being, to resume control of Eclipse.”

Living with turians my entire life has provided some unexpected advantages, most notably an unmatched poker face. Jona Sederis had been imprisoned on the Citadel for longer than I’d been alive, captured in a sting surrounding a plot to assassinate the elcor ambassador. If she was loose, C-Sec was going to have a hell of a time recapturing her. She’d had twenty-five years to study their operation, and dwell on the missteps that landed her in prison in the first place.

Detective Krios cleared his throat. “We’ve determined the best course of action is to send someone to infiltrate Eclipse, move into Sederis’s inner circle. A mole could warn us of her movements and be able to take actions that C-Sec cannot authorize on Illium.”

“You already have a mole on Illium, and as I told you, if you want a Spectre, you have to go with someone younger.” Mom said. Her hand was gripping Dad’s tightly. “I can convince the Council to grant the authority to use one, but I’m not chasing a psychopath around the Terminus systems.”

Bailey shook his head. “No. We considered Spectres, but that’s how we caught her last time. She’ll catch on quickly if we try to send someone with that much ability and training, not mention the access Spectres have to Council resources. We need someone younger, raw and moldable, without a paper trail. Preferably with some biotic ability.” He looked at me before returning his gaze to my parents. “Someone like Officer Shepard.”

My parents both erupted into protests, shouting over each other and over Bailey and Krios as they tried to fight back.

As everyone around me argued, I used my pinky to depress the haptic switch that turned off my translator. It was a habit I developed young. While my parents didn’t fight with each other often, I was sometimes privy to Mom’s disagreements with her Alliance superiors or with the Council, or Dad’s never-ending conference calls with Primacy. And it meant I didn’t have to fully hear when they were angry at me. It was easy to tune out when I didn’t understand the language.

Mom’s words were, as always, a mix of Colony English and Spanish, the latter increasing in frequency the more frustrated she got. To my surprise, Bailey also spoke Spanish – my translator was set to Alliance Standard English, one of the accepted galactic trade tongues, and it had never occurred to me that he’d speak something else. Dad’s Cipritine turian was a wave of vibrating rhythms, soothing to me after childhood nightmares but intimidating when he was angry. Drell was new to me, lyrical, almost as though grains of sand could sing.

Ori joined me on the stair. “You really should be listening,” she said quietly. “I know what it’s like to have others make decisions for you, and you need to take the opportunity to make yourself heard and understood.”

“How did you know?” I whispered back. For years, only Ravi knew about my habit of killing the translator. She shook her head and gestured back to the group arguing before us. Detective Krios said something that caused all of them to turn our way.

He repeated himself as the translator restarted. “What do you think, Officer Shepard? You’re the one we’re sending into this.”

I studied my parents’ expressions. On the surface, Dad looked stoic, but there were markers, hints of pain. Mom's fear was written on her face, worn and tired, as though her entire life of fighting had come to this. This was the hardest part of being Shepard and Vakarian’s kid. Everyone saw them as these great heroes, two of the galaxy's living legends. But these were the faces I saw most, the parents who still saw me as the little girl who once got out of their sight in the spaceport during Fleet Week, who spent weeks in Huerta after my brain rejected my first biotic implant, who still lived at home because it was easier than moving out. I was tired of those faces.

“I want to do it.” I said.

"Do you even know what you're agreeing to?" Mom asked. 

I straightened my back. "When do I start?"

Ori pulled up her omnitool and began composing a message. “Soon. Tomorrow if Miranda can work fast enough.”

“No,” Dad said. “Not tomorrow. Give us at least another day.”

“Tomorrow evening,” Bailey said in a flat tone. His expression indicated that his word was final. “Ms. Lawson will finish arrangements to send your daughter off-world. But you should know, Vakarian, once she leaves, she won’t have any contact with you. There will be no evidence she ever existed. We can’t risk any suggestion that would tie her to you. Sederis already has a grudge against Shepard for not releasing her during the war.”

Mom snorted. I shot her a questioning glance but her look told me she wasn’t going to elaborate.

Executor Bailey stood and gestured to Detective Krios and Ori to join him. “Take the day to say your goodbyes. Jona Sederis may be the most dangerous asari in the galaxy, including what Ardat-Yakshi remain. I won’t have Eclipse turning into the galaxy’s butchers just because she feels a need to resolve a grudge. Not on my watch, at least.”


	4. Chapter 4

I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept racing, darting between the anticipation of my first real mission, in deep cover, and the fear of the very real prospect that this could be my last night in this apartment—ever. Finally, after tossing and turning for what felt like hours, I surrendered to my restlessness and crept down the stairs. There were a fair amount of books in the study; I could read one until I started to fall asleep.

In our teenage years, I envied Ravi for getting the downstairs bedroom. Easier to sneak out, when that was important, but also easier to move around the apartment when you couldn’t sleep. You didn’t have to worry about setting off the front door motion sensor, waking Glyph, who would in turn wake everyone else, or if one was feeling truly daring, taking the stairs outside Mom and Dad’s room. In addition to the general nerve that would require, at least two of the stairs creaked and I could never remember which ones until my foot landed on the fateful step. I suspected Dad would occasionally tighten and loosen fittings on the stairs so I couldn't figure it out.

I chanced the front stairs. It would be easier to avoid the motion detector, or at least quickly silence the drone, than it would be to creep through the entire second floor, just to risk it all right outside my parents’ door. At twenty-one, I didn’t have any reason to fear waking my parents, but still. I was sure their night was equally restless.

Which is why I wasn’t completely surprised to see a vidscreen glowing around the fireplace wall.  Dad was sitting on the couch, a half-full bottle of turian whiskey set out in front of him, flipping through the photo reel on the screen.  Most of them were standard family fare, all four of us on the beach in Rio, a birthday dinner at a Citadel restaurant, Ravi and me with Grandfather and Aunt Solana on Palaven, Mom in her dress uniform at the Normandy’s decommissioning ceremony, things like that. I grabbed a glass from the bar and joined him wordlessly on the couch, pouring myself a share of the amber liquor.

I watched him continue to slide through the pictures, the reel going further and further back in time. One of the first photos after Ravi and I were adopted, Mom and Dad each holding one of us, the Presidium’s pools and gardens stretching out behind them. And pictures from before then: Mom and Aunt Tali drinking and watching a vid (I would bet all my credits that it was _Fleet and Flotilla_ ), my parents dancing at a party at some villa on Earth, and – “Hold on,” I said, staying Dad’s hand before he could skip to the next picture. The reel had landed on a group photo taken in our apartment, probably during the war if I had to guess. I recognized several of the people in it: my parents, obviously, Aunt Tali, one of my instructors from Grissom, Commander Alenko, and –

“Why is Oriana Lawson in this picture?” I asked. She was standing to the side, slightly aloof and clad in a white catsuit. It didn’t mesh at all with the woman I’d met earlier that evening, who looked like she’d just stepped off one of the Citadel’s trading floors.  Also, if my guess at the timing of the photo was correct, that meant Oriana was at least fifteen years older than she appeared.

Dad took a sip and studied the photo for a moment. “That’s not Oriana,” he said. “That’s Miranda Lawson, her older sister.”

“They look exactly alike.”

Dad pressed a finger on the bridge of his nose. “If I recall correctly, _technically_ , they’re twins. You’d have to ask your mom. The one time I got the full run-down on Miranda, I was too hopped up on painkillers and medigel to fully pay attention to what she was telling me.”

In that moment I wished I could raise an eyebrow like witty women in vids do when they question something. “What the hell happened?”

Dad simply gestured to the rough scars on the side of his face, then paused. “Actually, you should hear the story. Might give you some insight into the people you’re about to mess with.”

I held my breath. My parents, especially Mom, _never_ discussed the war. While the outcomes of my mother’s exploits are well-known, and public knowledge, I almost never heard the stories behind them. Most of what I had learned, beyond the base information we were given in school and what little more I gleaned during my time in the Alliance, I had picked up from a combination of Aunt Tali’s off-hand ramblings and a few unauthorized biographies that both of my parents dismissed as speculative bullshit as soon as they figured out who the sources were.

“Did I ever tell you how your mother and I ended up together?” Dad said finally.

“You make it sound so romantic,” I said, elbowing him in the side of his carapace. “And yes, you were working for C-Sec and trying to go after a rogue Spectre. Mom was chasing the same guy, and you teamed up.”

Dad chuckled. “No, that’s how I met her. Shepard was willing to let a couple of aliens onto her ship, which did not sit well with your namesake, incidentally, and we did get Saren in the end. But that’s not what I asked.”

He paused to refill his drink before continuing. “It was a dark time for me. The Normandy – the original one – had gone down two years earlier, and Shepard with it. I wasn’t in love with her then, but she was the only human who ever treated me like an equal and I respected the hell out of her for it. Anyway, I quit C-Sec and ran off to the Terminus systems, taking out pirates, mercs, and other scum who were making it hard for people to get by. I’d built myself a team, had a good thing going, but I was betrayed. Eventually, I ended up alone and cornered in an alley on Omega.”

“And Jona Sederis came after you?”

“No, Jona had been in prison since before I left C-Sec. But her agents on Omega had teamed up with two other mercenary groups, the Blood Pack and the Blue Suns, to try and take me out. Nearly did, too. Until your mother came along. Didn’t know it was her right away, not until I saw the N7 emblem on her armor and recognized how she handled a rifle, but she didn’t know it was me she was coming to rescue. Anyway, it all ended up with me taking a rocket to the face and her kicking several Eclipse asses around the Terminus for a variety of reasons, including smuggling Ardat-Yakshi and wholesale slaughter of some salarians whose only crime was being night janitors in an apartment building.”

I grimaced. “Sounds like a charming bunch.”

Dad shook his head. “Eclipse is ruthless. In order to earn their uniforms, new members must make a kill. And Jona gives her hardest lieutenants free reign over their charges. Sometimes you’ll see them act as security, though that’s never reassuring either.” He took another sip, eyes far away. “They’re dangerous.”

I slid closer to him, resting my head on the edge of his carapace, where it started to cave in towards his neck. When I was little, I would always try to fit my head there. It was a safe place, dark and hidden away from the world, a hard shell around me. Now I could only lean on the outside.

“So, you took a rocket to the face, and Mom fell in love with you? No wonder you never told your story to the biographers.”

 “Come on, you’ve heard the joke comparing your mother to a krogan. What the galaxy doesn’t know is that the punchline really involves having a serious thing for men with scars.” He took another sip, navigating his arm around my head. “There was some time in-between the scars and the…everything else. And, as much as I cared for her, I didn’t want to admit to anything until I knew how her court-martial played out—”

I sat up straight. “Wait, you’re telling me the Alliance court-martialed _Mom_? When? What happened? On what charges?”

Dad laughed and finished his drink. He stood and stretched, then reached his hand out to me. “That’s a story for another night. Now, go steal Anderson’s biography so you can scour it for hidden details that aren’t there for the hundredth time, and fall asleep in the process.”


	5. Chapter 5

The trip to the civilian spaceport was silent, broken only a few times by Ravi’s half-hearted attempts at levity. Mom was steering the skycar with a white-knuckled grip. We’d been over the same argument too many times that day: Mom would remark again that she’d wished they’d send a Spectre, or an N7 or huntress, after Jona Sederis, I’d remind her of Detective Krios’s reasoning, she’d recount her one experience talking to Sederis and Dad would shut us both down. As much disdain as my father carried for his tenure with C-Sec, for once it appeared he was on their side.

Which was another point of concern for me: this may have turned into the nastiest fight between my parents that I’d ever witnessed. I’d called Aunt Tali to tell her goodbye, not having enough time to physically go to the quarian embassy between dealing with my parents and wiping every trace of my existence from my office at C-Sec, and based on her reaction to what she could hear in the background, she hadn’t seen them fight like this either.

Mom never yells. Ever. Especially not at Dad. From the time she woke up that morning until the moment we loaded into the skycar, she was a nearly non-stop force of rage. She blamed C-Sec for putting me in this position, Dad for agreeing with C-Sec, and in one particularly tense round, accused Dad of behaving like Grandfather, which started a whole new and unrelated round of fighting. And now she was frighteningly silent.

I'd never traveled through the civilian port. Because of Mom's position with the N7 program, and after Dad finally caved and accepted a permanent position with the Citadel Council, we had always traveled on Alliance shuttles or turian diplomatic ships.  The port itself was packed, with lines of people coming and going, C-Sec officers organizing lines at customs checkpoints, and an endless stream of shuttles and taxis jockeying for fares. I grimaced. I'd spent three weeks working the customs line when I first started, and after being told off by a matriarch older than most of Europe, I told my supervisor I was never going back. It was the only time I used my parents as a pull in my career, and I felt dirty every time I thought about it. 

We pulled up alongside a non-descript Kodiak cruiser. Its call sign indicated it was based out of a Terminus colony but apart from that, there was nothing to differentiate it from the hundreds of other civilian shuttles that moved in and out of the Citadel daily. Leaning against the shuttle’s door was a woman who clearly could be the twin to the one I’d met the previous night, though with fine lines around her eyes and mouth and grey streaks through her hair. She was dressed in a black catsuit, similar to the one I'd seen in Dad's old photograph.

“You’re looking good, Shepard,” she said as we approached, extending her hand to shake Mom’s. She nodded at Dad.

Mom nodded back for both of them. “You do too, Miranda.”

“I look old,” she said. There was a faint hint of pride in her voice. “One more victory over my father, I guess. Even his skill with genetics can’t overcome the power of time.”

Miranda Lawson turned to Ravi and me. “You probably don’t remember meeting me. You were both very young.”

I shook my head, shifting the duffel bag I’d slung over my shoulder.

“You won’t be needing that,” she said. “Everything will be provided for you, including any necessities. Detective Krios said to not allow you to bring anything personal with you.”

 I stared at her. “There isn’t anything personal in here, it’s just clothes and shampoo.”

“For someone trying hard enough, a preferred scent of shampoo can be all they need to identify you.” Miranda gestured for me to drop the bag. “As soon as you get on this shuttle, Ashley Shepard no longer exists. As we speak, I have associates going through your family’s records here, on Earth, and on Palaven, erasing you from photographs and holiday greetings, removing any physical evidence of your existence. Your records from your Citadel schools, Grissom Academy, your Alliance service, and your time in C-Sec have already been erased. The documentation of your adoption, and your life before it, also no longer exists. Your biological parents died childless, just two more nameless casualties of Cerberus’s siege on the Citadel.”

Mom’s mouth tightened into a straight line and Dad was giving off an impeccable impression of stereotypical turian passivity.

Ravi, on the other hand, had something to say. “So, no matter what happens, we now go on like Ash never existed? Because, I know I’m not going to forget a lifetime of having a sister, and I’m pretty sure _they’re_ not going to forget about having a daughter.” He jutted a clawed finger at my parents for emphasis.

“If the mission is successful, everything will be restored upon Ashley’s return to C-Sec custody. Until then, it will be stored in a greybox in the possession of someone I trust who has experience with managing such things.” Miranda cast her eyes to the ground. “If you fail…it will be returned to you, Shepard.”

Mom’s expression softened at the mention of the greybox, though it was still severed. I turned to issue a final goodbye to my family, taking a last deep breath of the faint citrus and soap smell I associated with Mom, and a bone-crushing embrace from Dad. Ravi hugged me last, tighter than he had in years. “Come back,” he whispered in my ear. “I don’t know what it will do to them if you don’t.” I pressed my cheek against his, feeling a streak of his colony paint rubbing on to me. I hadn’t painted my face to match my turian family in years, partly because it felt weird, partly because I spent so much time trying to distance myself from my parents.

Miranda’s comm pinged and she glanced down. “We’ll have to leave soon. Kolyat and Ori arranged for a distraction to cover our departure, and we’ll only have a few minutes to slip past Citadel customs without being screened.”

“We’re breaking customs?” I asked, bewildered. That was not worth my career. A poorly piloted C-Sec shuttle flew overhead. Miranda slammed on the shuttle door, springing it open.  “That’s our distraction. Get in and buckle up. We don’t have time.”

I turned and ran into the shuttle, dropping my bag to the metal grate floor of the spaceport before I entered. As I sat down in the co-pilot seat, several krogan jumped out of the C-Sec shuttle’s hatch, making a beeline for the customs lines. Miranda slid into the seat next to me, moving with a languid grace that suggested we were simply taking off for a pleasure jaunt around the nebula, not racing against time to sneak past security and sprint off to parts unknown. But every movement had purpose, and we were pulling away from the spaceport slips before I could fully process the chaos around us.

One krogan broke away from the pack and turned towards the skycar that held my parents as they attempted to flee. “Um, Miranda?” I gestured to the scene below.

“Don’t worry. Grunt would never actually hurt your family.” Miranda glanced disdainfully at the hulking krogan slamming on the skycar. “Even if he didn’t love Shepard, your family is under Clan Urdnot's official protection. Grunt won't go against his clan chief.”

I stared at her, hoping she'd expand further on this revelation, but Miranda simply ignored me. She navigated the Kodiak through the throng of shuttles and ships escaping the Citadel’s artificial gravity fields and within moments, we were in the open space of the Widow nebula, speeding towards where I knew the mass relay was waiting. I’d made this trip dozens, if not hundreds, of times; I could probably fly it myself.

My comm chimed. Finch. Shit. I’d forgotten to tell him I’d be leaving the Citadel for a while. He was probably waiting for me to buzz him in to officer housing.

“Ignore it.” Miranda said, not taking her gaze away from the approaching mass relay. “When we reach our destination, your omnitool’s comm signal will be reprogrammed.”

“You mean you hadn’t done that in advance like everything else?” I scowled at my reflection in the windshield, framed by stars and the looming Reaper megalith. Miranda’s gaze rested on my expression and she killed the shuttle’s cabin lights.

“I need you present for its reconfiguration. And I can’t do that and fly this shuttle at the same time. You’ll just have to ignore your hails for now.”

I silenced the comm. Finch could get his rocks off somewhere else. With a less famous person’s daughter.

“I hope it wasn’t someone important,” Miranda said, turning the shuttle to face the rapidly rotating mass effect field, lining up with the relay’s long arms.

I shook my head. “It was nobody.”

The shuttle shook as we passed through the relay. I’d never made a jump in a craft this small and even though the Kodiak’s mass effect field prevented the force of the relay jump from shattering the shuttle, I was relieved when the craft came to a smooth halt. The shuttle’s star maps indicated we were hovering in the Hydra system. Miranda leaned back and exhaled, massaging her hands. “Sorry about that, I haven’t had to jump that far before. I’ve only ever gone one or two systems at a time.”

“So where are we going, anyway?” I asked, watching the slow passage of stars around us. “There’s nothing in this nebula.” I paused for a second, then asked, “Or are you trying to throw someone off our trail?”

“We shouldn’t have been followed,” Miranda set her hands on the controls again, bringing up the haptic nav panels. “Not yet, at least.”

She steered us away from the star system. “Brace yourself. FTL travel in a shuttle is a lot rougher than you’re probably used to.”

“And the mass relay wasn’t rough?” As the words came out of my mouth, I winced. I was sounding more and more like a bratty teenager the longer I was with Miranda. Get it together, Shepard.

No. Not Shepard. Just Ashley now.

“It was,” Miranda agreed. “But it was short. Unfortunately, we’re going to be at FTL for a few hours. We’re going to Pinnacle Station.”

I’d heard of that. Grandfather made trips out there periodically; it was a turian station, built during the Krogan Rebellions, and still used for spec ops training. Humans trained there, but it was rare and noteworthy. And they needed permission from the Primacy. Which meant that the Primacy knew C-Sec was sending a human here.

I was crestfallen when we reached the station and didn’t see a turian diplomatic ship docked alongside it. Though why should there be? We moved this too fast. Even if Mom and Dad knew where I was going, had time to call Grandfather, he still wouldn’t have had time to get here from Palaven before me.

What I did see, or rather who, waiting for us in the docking bay surprised me.

“Oh shit, it’s the cheerleader _and_ the princess of the Girl Scouts,” Jack said as the airlock doors slid open. “I knew this was going to suck, but no one told me exactly how much.” She looked just as I remembered her, which wasn’t surprising, since it had been less than three years since I’d left Grissom. Every inch of her body was tattooed, and yet she’d still found space to add her Alliance officer bars on both shoulders.

Jack waved us into the station. “Come on, Princess. We’re going to have some fun.”


	6. Chapter 6

I was sixteen again, following one of the most intimidatingly powerful human biotics in the galaxy towards a dorm room. Except this time, I was at Pinnacle and one of only a few humans as opposed to hundreds. At least now, I could drink legally, instead of sneaking swigs of brandy in Jamie Meyer’s room and tipsily making out with him.

Also no one was forcibly grabbing my arm and completely erasing my omnitool while I got drunk off two sips of cheap batarian shard wine, the way Miranda was doing as we walked down the hall. When she finally let go of me, my arm was humming in a way it hadn’t since I first got fitted for one.

“You’ll sleep here,” Jack said, swinging a door open at last. “Not as out of the way as I would like, but keeps you tucked out of the turians’ sight, and anyone else who might be paying a visit.” She jutted a thumb towards the elevator behind her. “I’ll be two floors down.”

Turning to Miranda, she added. “We’ll take it from here.”

We? Jack was the only non-turian I saw on the entire station. Who was she working with?

“It will take a few weeks to build her new identity. It takes a lot more time to create an entirely new person than it does to erase an existing one.”

Jack snorted. “You used to be way better at this, you know. The whole subterfuge thing.”

“I wasn’t the one inventing people out of thin air,” Miranda shot back. “Unless you’d prefer I dig Brooks out of whatever hole the Alliance shut her in, it’s going to take some time. And then we’d have two crazed sociopaths on the loose.”

“Go ahead,” Jack said, waving her hand dismissively. “The way things are going, Shepard could probably use something to shoot right about now.”

Miranda turned on the heel of her boot and left, not even pausing to say goodbye to me. Not like she had to, I guess.

“Bitch,” Jack muttered under her breath as soon as Miranda turned a corner and passed out of sight. She turned back to me. “Get some sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time to start. We need you fresh, and I need to be sure your biotics haven’t gone completely to shit since you left the Alliance.”

I started to open my mouth in protest, but she was in the elevator and gone before a worthy comeback fully formed in my mind. I looked inside the room. Well, Pinnacle was definitely turian. It was austere, spartan even. A bed, a three-shelf unit, and a small nightstand with a clock and intercom. It afforded me more space than crew quarters on an Alliance dreadnought, but it didn’t hold a candle to my room at home.

Jack’s barb about my leaving the Alliance stung more than she probably intended it to. I never wanted to enlist in the first place, but my parents insisted. The overwhelming majority of students at Grissom had their tuition subsidized by Alliance training grants, and in return they owed years of service commensurate with the years spent at the Academy. I was only there two years, bridging the gap between the end of my compulsory education on the Citadel, but some had been there for most of their lives. Despite being able to independently afford my tuition, my parents decided I would be facing the same future as my peers: one year of Alliance service for each year I spent at Grissom. I didn’t mind the routine, or the shape it kept me in, but I got tired of being a barrier flunky for some gun-happy marine who was too focused on spraying and praying to check his six. And in the Alliance, the name Shepard comes saddled with very high expectations. Expectations I wasn’t willing or able to meet.

I fell asleep quickly, and it must have been pretty sound, since Jack’s “wake up call” turned out to be her warping me across the room. I crashed against the wall and slid to the floor.

“Get up,” she barked at my crumpled body. I didn’t move, trying to shift my focus away from the growing bruises on my back and arms. I kept my eyes shut, listening. I heard her leather-clad arm brush against skin. She was gearing up to hit me again.

As Jack shouted, “Get up!” again, I threw out a barrier of my own, counteracting her attempts to lift me again. She walked over to me and held out her hand. “Not bad, but you’re going to have to be better than that if you’re going to break into Eclipse. A merc band run by asari isn’t going to be impressed by your weak-ass barriers, Shepard.”

“That’s not my name anymore,” I said, climbing up on my own steam. Damn, my back was going to hurt tomorrow.

“Yeah, well, that’s what I know you as, so you’re going to have to deal with it for now. At least until the cheerleader gives you a new name.” Jack grabbed two steaming mugs of coffee from the top of my empty shelving unit. “Come on. It’s time to start. And you’re about to realize that I’m Mary Fucking Sunshine compared to Aria.”

I followed her into the elevator, sipping my coffee. Like everything else on the station, it was turian, and tasted awful. There was a reason Mom insisted on only Earth-grown, or at least sim-Earth-grown coffee. Humans make coffee with roasted ground beans. Turians make it with a tree root, similar to chicory on Earth. Except that it just tastes burnt and overcooked. At least it has the desired effect.

“Who’s Aria?” I asked once I’d been able to choke down a few sips.

Jack didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, the elevator doors opened to reveal a sparring room, with matted floors and a single pole in the middle. Standing in front of the pole was a stone-faced asari with her arms crossed. “I am.”

She turned to Jack. “You’re late. You were supposed to be here at 09:00 sharp. That was ten minutes ago.”

“Whoops,” Jack said casually.  She stared down the asari, her free hand twisting to gather biotic energy. I stepped back, putting distance between Jack and the pissed-off asari in front of her. I’d been caught in the middle of biotic firefights. I didn’t care to repeat the experience.

Aria cast her eyes up and down. “I didn’t come here to fight with you, Subject Zero. I came to see what you brought me to work with.” She looked me over, ignoring Jack’s pronounced scowl. “Can’t say that I’m impressed. What’s your name?”

“Ashley,” I say quietly. This woman’s presence took every last nerve out of me. She had to be at least four hundred years old, but looked thirty. Every nerve in my body was screaming danger.

Aria rolled her eyes. “Don’t you humans have any imagination, or is literally every girl your age named that?”

She has a point. Gunnery Sargent Ashley Williams’s heroism on Virmire sent her first name skyrocketing to the top of the baby name lists on Earth and in human colonies. There were seven other Ashleys—or some variation thereof—in my class year at the Silversun District School, and three in my cohort at Grissom. I can’t swing a stick without hitting another human with my name. If you were born between 2184 and 2187 and your name is Ashley, congratulations, you are far from alone.

“Not that it matters anyway, since Ms. Lawson is busy erasing your entire existence,” Aria went on, continuing to study me with unblinking eyes, “but do you have a last name, _Ashley_?”

I took a deep breath. “Shepard. My full name is Ashley Jane Shepard.”

“Fuck.” Aria turned back to Jack. “When the fuck were you going to tell me they were sending me Shepard’s kid?”

Jack gulped down the last of her coffee. “I didn’t know until last night! I was just as surprised as you to see her walk through that airlock. They just told me they were bringing a C-Sec biotic, and to be here to train her.”

“This is Bailey’s doing,” Aria snarled. Both of her fists were glowing, and the air around her grew thick with static.

“You’re damn right it is,” Bailey said from behind us, striding into the room, Detective Krios in his wake. “The entire galaxy knows not the fuck with Aria, but who’s the one person Aria T’Loak won’t fuck with? You still owe Shepard a favor, don’t you? For returning your pirate kingdom to you?”

Aria flexed her hands, dispelling the biotic glow. “The balance sheet between Shepard and myself is too long and complicated to determine who owes whom anymore. But I’m not going to be responsible for sending her kid to her death.”

Bailey nodded curtly. “That’s right. You’re not. In fact, along with Krios, your main goal is keeping her alive. And in exchange, I’ll continue to look the other way regarding your organization’s presence on the Citadel.”

I finally found my voice. “Can someone please explain to me what the fuck is going on here? Because everyone’s going on like I’m not here and I want to know why you’ve thrown me onto this station in the middle of nowhere and now you’re all arguing over whose job it is to keep me alive.”

Detective Krios cleared his throat. “Officer Shepard – excuse me, Ashley – is right. It’s time we brought her up to speed on the plan.”

Jack turned to me again. “So, Shepard, how well can you dance?”


	7. Chapter 7

”Excuse me?” I asked, not sure I’d heard Jack correctly.

She repeated herself, a smug grin spreading across her face. “How well can you dance? Not that my hopes are particularly high, considering who raised you.”

Detective Krios cleared his throat. “In order to garner the Eclipse’s, and by extension, Jona Sederis’s, attention, the plan is to place you as an…ahem…exotic dancer in Ms. T’loak’s nightclub on Omega.”

I blinked a few times, letting the words sink in. “You want me to be a stripper?” I asked, thinking of the girls I’d seen working in Chora’s Den and Purgatory. Thank heaven my parents weren’t here to hear that. And definitely thank the turian spirits that Grandfather wasn’t here to hear it. I could only imagine the uproar that the Primarch’s granddaughter taking her clothes off in a back-alley bar would create.

“My girls are not _strippers_ ,” Aria said indignantly. “They’re the best dancers in the Terminus. That senseless, conniving pure-blood bitch thinks she can sneak one of her pathetic showgirls into my operation, as if I don’t know everything that happens on Omega.”

“Senseless is putting it mildly,” Bailey said, projecting a case file onto the vidwall behind us. “But yes, shortly before Sederis’s escape, one of our informants in the Terminus systems gave us a tip that she was trying to place moles in Aria’s operations.”

“That dancer is losing me money,” Aria muttered bitterly. “I’ve had to schedule her opposite the Sinyah Sisters for the saps who don’t get into the private show. It’s the only way she brings in any credits.”

“Anyway,” Bailey went on, ignoring Aria’s lamentations about her business, and swiping through panels on the case file. “We had already approached Aria about placing a counter-mole in Eclispe, using Afterlife as a front. With Sederis on the loose, we’ve had to move the timeline up considerably.”

Krios nodded and picked up. “We want you to befriend the Eclipse mole, gain her trust, and garner the attention of her handlers. Eclipse takes on humans with biotic talent, so you’ll need to find ways to make your skillset known. That’s why we recruited Jack for the specific task of training you. ”

I raised an eyebrow. While Jack’s biotics were undeniably powerful, she was also going to teach me to do…well, I guess whatever Aria wanted me to do that wasn’t necessarily stripping. I wanted to point out that while she wasn’t exactly known for wearing clothes, it didn’t mean she had any talent at taking whatever was left off. But I was also worried about being flung across the room again—by Jack or Aria, who was now studying me with the coldest, most calculating expression I’d ever seen—so I kept my mouth shut.

“I’ll check in with Jack regarding your progress while you’re here,” Bailey said. “C-Sec sends agents to Pinnacle on a fairly regular basis, and the turian councilor has a direct QEC link to the station, so we’ll be able to talk. Once you get on Omega, however, you’ll be handled directly by Krios. Once we have our systems in place, he’ll be in touch with what signals to look out for to identify when and where you should meet.”

He brushed his hands on his slacks and closed the file on the screen. “I’ll be visiting again with a delegation from the turian hierarchy in about a month and I’ll make the decision at that time as to whether or not you’re ready to be moved.”

And with that, Bailey and Krios excused themselves and left as quickly as they had arrived, leaving me to the two women staring me down.

“Strip,” Aria said plainly. “I need to see what I’m working with.”

I crossed my arms across my chest and stared her down. “I don’t think so.”

She snorted. “Princess, you’d better get used to being naked in front of someone other than your mirror if you have any hope of making it out of this alive. I’m not asking you to take it all off, but if I’m taking you on, I need to see the goods. That’s an order.” Taking her eyes away from me to study her fingernails, she added, "if you don't do it yourself, I'll take them off for you. And you will not enjoy it."

Jack shrugged indifferently when I looked at her. I sighed and pulled off the T-shirt and leggings I’d been wearing since I left the Citadel. Standing in only a bra and briefs, Aria and Jack began to circle me. I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling self-conscious. Sure, I’d been naked in front of other people before, no one gets out the Alliance without that experience, but no one was studying my body either.

“No tattoos,” Aria said plainly. “Not even any significant scarring. Are you sure you’re Shepard and Vakarian’s kid, Princess?”

“Stop calling me that,” I said, balling my hands into fists. I started summoning a barrier, just to feel more secure.

Aria flicked her hand and sent a shockwave towards me. The force knocked me backwards and slid me across the matted floor until my bare back smacked into the solitary metal pole. “You were raised by two of the most famous people in the galaxy, with the vid royalty fortune to go along with it. You probably wanted for nothing your entire life, jetting between the Citadel, Earth, Palaven, and the Goddess knows where else without a second thought. You sound like every other spoiled Citadel-bred brat that’s come through my club thinking she wants some adventure and to upset Mummy and Daddy a little bit in the process, but will be on the next shuttle to the Widow Nebula the second she gets groped the first time. I’m going to call you Princess until you stop acting like one. Got it?”

I winced, reaching around to touch the tender, growing bruise along my spine.

“I asked you a question, Princess.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly, trying to mask the pain in my voice. “I got it.”

Aria crossed the room and was on me in two steps. “Good.” She offered me a hand and pulled me up when I took it. “Now, I don’t expect you to come in and steal the limelight from girls who’ve been with me for decades or centuries. Miranda will probably make you some colony farmgirl who planned to run off to the bright lights of Illium but her credits couldn’t get her that far. But you will need to be good enough that I’m not going to regret setting you out on my club floor.”

Turning back to Jack, she said, “Get her passably competent. Have her use biotics to compensate for anything she can’t get down in a month. I’ve already raised drink prices to cover for one shit dancer. I can’t afford to do it again.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Jack muttered as Aria brushed past both of us to leave the room.

“What did she mean by my using biotics to compensate?” I asked once Aria was gone

Jack sighed and grabbed the pole. “Aria likes having human pole dancers in Afterlife. Makes it stand out from the other bars on Omega. All her human girls, and most of her asari, have been doing it for ages and bring in tons of creds. But she’s been known to bring on someone who isn’t as good if she’s pretty enough and Aria thinks she can bring in money from private shows.”

I bit my lip to keep from flinching. “So why the biotics?”

Jack jumped up on the pole and started swinging herself around it. “So you can make shit look fancy without having to actually hold yourself up.” She straightened out her legs and let go, leaning backwards. A faint warp field built around her, holding her body in place. When she grabbed the pole again, she dropped the field and lowered herself to the flow. “A narrow warp field is challenging, especially when you cast it on yourself. My job is to get your fields as small and as powerful as possible.”

She eyed me carefully. “And to build up any offensive capability you have. Aria doesn’t care if her clients get friendly, or if her girls fight back, as long as it doesn’t make a scene. My guess is the best way to get Eclipse’s attention is to use your biotics to fight off any unwanted attention, help you fly under the radar when you need to. And that’s something I have experience with. And the combat sims here will drill any weapons proficiency you may have.”

“So where do we start?” I asked. I started for my clothes, still piled across the floor. Jack held her hand out to my bare chest, stopping me in my tracks.

“We start by getting you comfortable with this pole.”


	8. Chapter 8

I was developing a routine on Pinnacle. I’d wake up, choke down at least one cup of turian coffee – a taste I was getting used to but still couldn’t honestly say I liked – and head to the pole room. There, Jack spent hours teaching me to twist myself into various configurations and hold myself in place with small fields. My skin was mottled with various bruises from contact with the steel pole, but I was improving. 

After mornings on the pole, I choked down the levo-nutripaste and spent my afternoons in Pinnacle’s combat simulator. Some days I fought alongside turians, but most of the time it was just me and Jack. And it seemed as though the sim was only programmed to give me one kind of enemy.

“Am I really going to be fighting this many krogan?” I yelled across the synthetic moon surface as I jammed a new thermal clip into the Shuriken I’d been training with for most the last month.  I peeked over the surface of the boulder I was using for cover. The digitally constructed horde kept advancing. I threw up a warp field, lifting the three closest to me, and watched them turn into pixelated mist.

About ten feet away from me, Jack grinned as she reloaded her shotgun. “Turians, babe. They built this place in response to the Krogan Rebellions so they could be ready for the next one.”

I groaned in response to both Jack’s comment and the bruise I inadvertently rubbed when I’d leaned on the boulder. I met the Krogan ambassador once – while he got on pretty well with Dad, he seemed extremely suspicious of turians and would absolutely take Pinnacle’s simulations as a provocation if he knew about them.

“Get ready!” Jack yelled. I turned again and fired off a bust of shots before completely discharging my barrier into the nearest pack.

Suddenly, the lights came on and the simulation was killed. “Miss Jack, the turian diplomatic ship has docked at the station.” I could barely see the outlines of the technicians who ran the simulation through the glass.

“That’s today?” I asked the glass wall. Jack began cursing behind me. She grabbed my arm and pulled me into the armory. I reached for my street clothes, still resting on a bench from where I’d left them not even an hour before, but she pulled them away from me before I could get to them, tossing them into an open locker and slamming it shut. “That’s not mine,” I remarked, rubbing the spot where she grabbed me.

“We’ll get the combination later. Give me your gun.”

“What?”

Jack held her hand out. “The hierarchy doesn’t know there are humans on this station. Better to have one armed human than two.”

I handed over the submachine gun. Jack retracted the components and stuck the cylinder in one of the many pockets of her cargo pants. We walked into the observation area, where the turians were frantically smoothing their uniforms and clearing their workstations. While still regimented in routine, the station’s atmosphere was generally more relaxed. Days old coffee mugs were strewn everywhere and uniform protocol was dismissed in favor of comfort. Marixta Senta, the general overseeing the station, was sweeping through the room, pulling all unnecessary materials into a bin. She stopped when she saw us. “Miss Jack, you may want to find more suitable clothing. The Primarch is coming aboard.”

“Grandfather?” I asked at the same time that Jack yelled, “SHIT!” She began pushing me towards one of the observation room’s many equipment lockers.

“What are you doing?”

Jack yanked the locker door open, revealing a rack of uniforms for use in the combat sim. “The Primarch doesn’t know you’re here. And he’s not going to. Get in.”

“You’re joking.”

Jack’s hands crackled with accumulating biotic charge. “Get in before I throw you in.”

“I want to see—” I didn’t finish the sentence. Jack slammed the full force of her powers into me, biotically shoving me into the rack of clothes. The impact of the metal wall into my back caused me to crumple to the locker’s floor, groaning from the generation of what was surely another bruise.

“Slap some medi-gel on it,” Jack said as she slammed the door. The metal-on-metal crash bounced off every surface of the locker, ringing around me long after the event, and echoing in my brain beyond that. I curled into a ball, pressing my hands against my temples, willing to clanging between my ears to stop. Stars were dancing before my eyes and I clenched them shut, only to have the stars replaced by shifting designs of dark upon deeper dark, supernovas of blackness mimicking the pain.

The commotion outside the locker silenced suddenly, and I heard the door to the sim observation slide open. Dozens of turian boots slammed to the floor as the station’s occupants stood at attention. General Senta addressed the guests. “Welcome, Primarch Vakarian.”

“At ease, General.” Grandfather sounded as he’d always done since assuming the primacy: affable, but tired. He wanted to relax everyone around him because he wanted to relax himself. Moving as quietly as I could inside a steel cabinet, I stood and leaned myself against the door, angling my eyes so I could see out the narrow slats on the panel. Just the backs of carapaces. I could barely see through them to Grandfather; he looked older than even the last time I’d spoken to him, which was only a few days before this whole charade began. 

"I see we gave you enough time to clean up." Grandfather said. Appreciative laughs echoed through the room. "I wanted to bring the Councilor and the Executor to review the simulation's most recent upgrades. I was hoping the Executor would be able to see the city siege protocol you sent me in your last report. And you may remember Councilor Sparatus’s advisor—”

“Good to see you’re still alive, Vakarian,” General Senta said. One of the carapaces moved forward and embraced another turian. Dad. “When are you and Shepard going to bring those kids of yours out here? Surely they can handle a gun by now.”

I sucked in a breath. Jack must have been leaning right outside the locker, because she suddenly slammed herself against the door, blocking my line of sight. But the clamor covered the hiss I’d made.

I didn’t realize how much I was missing my parents until I heard Dad’s laugh. “Always have to make a scene, don’t you, Jack?”

“Bite me, Garrus,” she said. Her posture shifted to a more casual one, lifting her hand to examine her nails.

Answering an unasked question, probably in response to an expression I couldn’t see, General Senta said, “Miss Jack has been testing the capabilities of a new biotic implant prototype in our simulator. The request came directly from Grissom Academy, and I didn’t believe the Hierarchy needed to be informed.”

“That’s quite all right, General,” Grandfather said. “Would you please run the new simulation for the Executor to observe?”

The booted turians dispersed, their footfalls growing more and more faint as they moved towards the armory. The locker door shifted slightly as another body came to rest on it. Dad’s familiar scent wafted through the vents. “I’m surprised you agreed to be experimented on again,” he said to Jack.

“At this point, I figure what the hell, I can handle it. The Academy at least treats me like a person instead of a guinea pig.” She was examining her hands, pointedly not looking at Dad. In my two years at the Academy, I learned that while Jack was a terrific instructor, she had no poker face whatsoever. If she looked at him, he’d know something was up. “Couldn’t convince Shepard to go with you?”

Dad sighed. “We’ve had a…family situation that’s hit her hard. Haven’t been able to get her out of the apartment for much of anything.”

I imagined Mom standing in the apartment, staring out the windows at the Silversun Strip but not actually seeing it, the way she always got when something was bothering her. She’d been against my leaving, but I didn’t think it would put her in one of her moods. Guilt washed over me. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to break out of the locker and tell Bailey I was quitting. Tell Dad to take me home. I’d desk jockey forever. Because I hated when Mom got all quiet and far away.

“But, I used the time to calibrate the weapons systems on Dad’s ship, so it was for the best on this trip, at least.”

Jack laughed. Beyond them, I could hear General Senta and Grandfather talking to Bailey, who was acting like it had been years since he'd encountered Pinnacle's capabilities, as though he hadn’t been calling in to Jack every few days for the last month.

The door creaked again and both Jack and Dad moved towards the front of the observation room. I took advantage of the distraction to sit again, absorbing the discussion around me. The review went on for some time, Grandfather and General Senta boasting about the capabilities of the new metropolis protocols and reviewing the variety of scenarios they could run. I scowled to myself when I realized the list of enemies extended beyond krogan, and wondered why I’d spent the last month dealing with only the indestructible turtles.

Plans for dinner were made, and Dad invited Jack to come visit on the Citadel. It had been ages and I was starting to get a cramp from being stuck in the locker.

Bodies began filing out of the room and I counted steps to figure out how many people were left. Would Jack let me out of the locker, or was I going to have to bang on the door a few times before she released me? Either way, I had to wait until I got some idea of an all-clear.

“Are you planning to take your biotic show on the road?” I heard Bailey ask suddenly. He had to be addressing Jack – no one else on the station had biotics.

“Depends on how much damage I can do with this baby,” she said back. “I was thinking maybe taking her for a test drive on Omega, clean up some of the scum that’s moved back in Archangel’s absence.” On the far side of the room, I heard someone remark that the merc had retired. Jack responded to that with a snort.

“Just don’t kill any colonist kids out there,” Bailey said indifferently. “Alliance is having enough trouble keeping track of the human population in the Terminus without a crazed biotic on the loose.”

A few moments later, the door opened and Jack loomed over me. Apart from a technician at the sim’s main operation panel, we were alone in the observation room.

“About fucking time,” I said, crawling on to the floor. “Next time you need me to hide, can you not give me a concussion in the process?”

Jack held out a hand. I took it and she pulled me upright. “Next time you need to hide, you’re on your own, Princess.” She tapped her omni-tool a few times and I felt mine ping in response to a data transfer. “As soon as we can arrange transport, you’re going to Omega.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay everyone! I had a board exam for my career in October, and studying took priority over writing. But I'll begin updating this story somewhat more regularly again, as well as making tweaks and edits to the previous chapters.

Jack navigated the cruiser into a docking bay. “Welcome to Omega, Princess.” She handed me a datapad. “Here’s your new life.”

The datapad contained an Alliance Identity System card for a girl named Ashley Ward. Much of her background was information I’d be able to recall easily. The year I was born, but my mother’s birthday instead of my own. I was from rebuilt Ferris Fields. And my file had me tagged as a runaway, flagged as a danger to myself and others due to untrained biotic abilities. She had a meager bank account, probably just enough to cover a few days of food, and some books, vids, and pop music saved in her personal data. The only personal photo was of a broken seashell.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked, transmitting the data to my omni-tool. “Just stroll into the central market and start asking for directions to Aria’s bar?”

Jack took the datapad and slapped it on my shoulder. The screen broke. “Don’t be so fucking stupid.” She wiped the data on the pad. “Follow me.”

She got out of the shuttle and immediately broke for an alley. I jogged behind her, trying not to pant the futher we ran. “The data said I was an untrained biotic. How is that supposed to go along with the fact that you just spent the last month forcing me to make the tightest warp fields I’ve ever generated?”

Jack slowed up, checking a map on her omnitool. “We’re upgrading you,” she said and pulled two biotic amps out of her pocket. “Bailey slipped me these babies during his little visit the other day. L8 amps, fresh from the Alliance labs on the Citadel.”

I recoiled. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’m not putting that in my head!” The last wetware upgrade I got, right before I entered the Alliance, gave me migraines with auras for weeks. And those were L6s that had over a decade of fine-tuning, placed under the watchful eyes of an asari physician.

“Princess, when you signed on to this job you agreed to do whatever we asked.” Jack closed her hand over the amps, sealing them in her fist. “The L8s are the next best thing to actually _being_ an asari. You need them if you’re going to hang with the big girls in Eclipse.”

She started back down the alley, turning finally at a flickering clinic sign.

“I’m still not letting you install that thing in my brain.” I said.

“I’m not going to,” Jack said, pounding on the clinic’s side door. It slid open. “He is.”

A middle-aged human man in a doctor’s coat looked up from a desk and scowled.

“Hey there, Abrams,” Jack said, sliding on to the desk, trapping him in place with her legs. “Got a little job for you.”

“Oh no, Jack.” The man tried to back away but Jack was faster. She deployed a stasis field, locking him into his chair. “I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not giving you free medical care.”

“That’s not what your boss would have wanted,” Jack said. She lifted the stasis field, carrying Abrams up above his chair.

Abrams scowled. “Don’t you tell me what Mordin would have wanted. If it wasn’t for Shepard and her miserable henchmen, he’d still be treating patients and not a dust cloud over Tuchanka.”

Jack slammed the field to the floor. “The way I remember it, if it wasn’t for Shepard and her _henchmen_ , you’d be a blood spatter on an apartment floor and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.” She released the field and dropped the amps on the desk. “And besides, Mordin would still be dead by now. He was ancient for a salarian. Now put these amps into that pretty little girl over there.”

“I said no.” Abrams rubbed his forehead and kept his eyes trained on the floor.

Jack rolled her eyes. “Do it now, and call Aria when you’re done. One million credits will be transferred into your account when it’s done.”

My eyes widened. Where was she getting that sort of funding? Surely not from C-Sec.

Abrams scowled again, but picked up the amps. Jack nodded approvingly. “Good boy.”

She turned to leave, stopping when she met me at the door. “Sorry about this, Princess,” she said, raising her fist. I barely had time to blink before it collided with the side of my skull.

~

“What the hell did you drag me all the way down here for?” Aria’s voice echoed in the small room. I opened my eyes, blinking away the blur. Mistake, I thought as a wave of nausea hit me. I rolled over and vomited onto a grimy concrete floor.

I heard footsteps, booted feet followed by heels I recognized as Aria’s. The sounds pounded against my skull and my vision glittered. Bile rose in my throat again. Oh no. I retched for a second time, the vomit splashing against a pair of well-worn shoes.

“I found her dropped outside my clinic,” Abrams said. “Looks like they tried to self-install an amp into her. I did what I could to correct the damage, but she’s going to have a rough go of it for a few days.”

Aria’s boots clicked towards me. I saw a blue hand pass over my face. Her fingers reached below my chin and tilted my head upwards. She was shadowed, backlit by the sterile glare of clinic lights. I closed my eyes, fighting the stars whirling in my view. Abrams was right about that; I was in for a hell of a migraine.

“What do you want me to do with her?” Aria’s hand let go of my face. I rolled back over, curling into a ball. “I don’t take on charity cases.”

Abrams coughed. “Someone has to pay her clinic bill. She’s a pretty kid. I’m sure you can use another bartender.”

“And pay you instead of her.” Not a question. Aria sighed. “Fine. One of my girls just quit anyway. Get her a cab when she’s done puking and send her my way.”

The impending migraine arrived in force and lasted for hours after they left me, but when I found I was able to stand and not immediately collapse again, a skycar was waiting for me at the clinic’s door. Squinting through the window tint, I could only make out a seashell resting on the dashboard.

Detective Krios was inside, and handed me a thermos as I slid onto the open seat. I glanced at him suspiciously. “It’s water. You’ve probably been drugged enough today.”

I nodded in agreement. The water was cool and I took a cautious sip. Revisiting the meager contents of my stomach had left me dehydrated, but drinking too fast would start the process all over again.

Krios steered the skycar into traffic. “How are you feeling? I understand that biotic amp surgeries are stressful for humans.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “About the same as last time they upgraded my gear. I’ll probably feel like shit for a few days.” Another sip of water.

“We don’t have a few days,” Krios said. “We’ve received intel from another source that Eclipse may be planning to strike a target sooner than we originally thought.” He gestured to a bag on the rear seat. “There are some pain meds in the bag.” Turning back to the skylane, he added. “I will be available if you need me, but it’s best if we keep our contact to a minimum. If you ever do need to speak with me, set a picture frame with the seashells in view from your apartment window.”

“Can C-Sec really afford multiple apartments for cover agents, Detective?”

Krios shook his head. “Aria will arrange for you to live with one of her other dancers. C-Sec has some funding, but most of our officers have jobs as part of their cover. Such as this cab.” He frowned at the fare meter as it continued to tick higher. “Also, from here forward, you must call me Kolyat. Here, I’m just another drell cab driver.”

I nodded, casting a glance at the fare. “I can’t afford that,” I said quietly, thinking of what little funds were in my account.

“Aria will pay this round.” Kolyat said. “But I cannot rely on her to pay a taxi fare every time we speak.” He lowered the car out of the sky lane and shut off the engine. “If I need to speak to you, a bar tab will include a prayer written on the tip line. Evangelists are rare on Omega. You’ll know it’s me.”


	10. Chapter 10

I skirted Afterlife’s elcor bouncer and pulled up alongside a sneering batarian at the door. “I was told to ask for Aria?” I asked. I fidgeted, shifting my weight from side to side. Briefly, I wondered if this anxiety would help or hurt my case.

“You the one from Abrams’s clinic?” he asked, not bothering to even look me over. I nodded. “Go inside. Aria’s waiting for you.”

The doors slid open and I walked into what were surely the gates of hell. Flames streamed up the vidwalls on either side and above me and the music pulsed like a new heartbeat. The impact of the high volume and bass pull at the edges of my medically-suppressed migraine, and I forced myself to keep going. At the end of the tunnel, a press of people thrummed together in time, vibrating along to the tune. At the center, three asari stomped and twirled around steel poles stretching from the top of the bar to the nightclub’s ceiling. And above them all, on a private balcony with her back turned to the sights below, I recognized the dark blue fringe of Aria T’Loak.

I began to push through the crowd, weaving between asari, turians, and humans alike. More than one set of hands ran past my body and I was certain at least one person tried to grab ahold, but I kept moving until I made my way to the far side of the throng. A second batarian guard nodded at me as I approached the stairs to Aria’s balcony and gestured for me to climb them.

Aria’s eyes were like liquid steel as I approached her, and she gave me no sign of recognition. She took another sip of her drink before turning to me. “I understand you have quite the debt to pay off, Miss Ward.”

I nodded, clasping my hands in front of me like I’d done when I was small. I could feel a twinge of pain building up again at the base of my skull.

“Well, lucky for you,” Aria said, setting her drink down and signaling to one of her henchmen, “I could use another dancer.”

The batarian pressed through the crowd and a moment later one of the dancing asari atop the bar descended to the floor. Within seconds they were in front of us. “Desidra, I’ve found you a new roommate.” Aria glanced dismissively at the dancer. “Take her to the back and get her fitted. Twenty minutes.”

“What?” I stared at her, stunned. I was in no state to dance, not with my brain threatening to explode again any second. Kolyat’s meds would only numb the pain; they couldn’t stop the force behind it.

“Twenty minutes.” Aria’s eyes flicked towards her onmitool. “You’ve already wasted twenty-five seconds.”

Desidra’s violet skin paled to lavender and she grabbed my wrist to pull me away from the balcony. We skirted the walls of the club until we reached an innocuous panel. It glowed green as she waved her omnitool over it. “Aria doesn’t want the patrons knowing where the girls change,” she said, addressing my confused expression. “We’re ten panels from Raz’s bar, if you need to count for a while.”

“Which one is Raz?” I asked. “And what if he’s off?” I was too busy following her and blinking rapidly to fight off the building photosensitivity. I was going to be in trouble if I didn’t get out of this club fast. Mercifully, the dressing room was darker. 

Desidra rolled her eyes. “The turian missing one eye. He carved his name into the shelf behind the bar a few years back. Arms out.” She spread hers wide for me to mimic. I complied and she ran her omnitool the length of my arms and torso, recording measurements. “You’re what, 160 centimeters?”

“Close enough.” 

Desidra fished through a wardrobe of shiny red bodysuits that matched her own. “You may want to start stripping,” she said. “Aria may have said twenty minutes, but that means that twenty minutes from that point we better be back up on that stage shaking our asses.” 

She pulled a suit from the lineup and glanced back at my now mostly-nude body. “Not that you have much to speak of. Tits, either.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly, crossing my arms to cover my meager assets, thankful for the additional coverage of the low light. She handed me the suit and her eyes went wide as her hand brushed my arm.

“By the goddess, you’re ripped.” Desidra narrowed her gaze and stared me straight on. “Where did you say you were from?”

Crap. Nothing in the cover story Jack gave me would excuse my Alliance and C-Sec built physique. “I didn’t.” I stepped both feet into the bodysuit’s legs and began sliding the tightfitting material upward. “I grew up outside Ferris Fields. My parents were farmers.”

“Were?”

I shrugged my arms into both sleeves. Despite Desidra’s assesment of my chest, the cut of the bodice managed to make me looked substantially more blessed in that department. “Batarian raid,” I said, trying to keep my tone flat, as though I was controlling my emotions. “I left right after.” I silently prayed that Miranda’s work would support any scrutiny.

Desidra snapped the shoulders of the suit together, and I caught sight of myself in the mirror. It looked painted on, like I’d taken a bath in blood. “You want shoes?” Desidra gestured to her own heels. I shook my head; Jack had only trained me to dance barefoot. Forget the migraine, I couldn’t risk breaking an ankle half an hour into the job.

She smiled. “It took me a bit to get used to them, but everyone uses these eventually.” She gestured. “Not only do their make your ass look amazing, they work great against creeps who think that they can get laid with only 1000 credits.”

It was my turn for my eyes to go wide. “Are we supposed to sleep with the...guests?” Because that was  _ definitely _ not in the job description.

“Goddess, no!” Desidra laughed. “There’s no rule against it, except that Aria wants to see at least 40,000 cross the bar before you do. Personally, I wait for 100,000, and they have to be absolutely gorgeous.” She waved me on, and we re-entered the club. I winced as the red and yellow lights from the vidwalls hit my eyes. “If you do, any of the private show rooms, the ones with red marquees, can be used.”

“They all have red marquees.”

She nodded. “No one will blame you if you don’t want to do it. The Sinya sisters don’t, and neither do a few other acts. And everyone has their preferences. I won’t do hanar. The tentacles creep me out and they never fucking shut up about their stupid religion.”

“How much are the private shows?” I asked.

Desidra shrugged. “Depends. I try to get at least 2000 a viewer if I’m going to do one. More if I’m going to start removing clothes. Theirs or mine.”

We reached the gate to the central bar and she paused. “One more thing before we go up there,” she said, turning back to me. She cast a wary glance up towards the balcony and I followed her gaze. Even though Aria’s back was turned, I got the distinct sense she was somehow still watching us. Turning back to me, she said, “I don’t know what Aria has on you, or whatever reason brought you here, but don’t think you can pull one over on her. She has eyes and ears everywhere on Omega.”

I took a deep breath. Something on my face must have caught Desidra’s attention. “You better puke before you get up there, because once you’re on that platform, you don’t come down until one of Aria’s men says so.” She gestured to a bucket behind one of the bartenders, a salarian with an unpleasant expression. 

I took her advice and pressed a cool cloth to my face before I followed her up the stairs. I had twenty seconds to spare.


	11. Chapter 11

After two years at Grissom, and the last month on Pinnacle, I never would have believed I’d say it, but thank God for Jack. I may have hated her for the hours and hours she drilled me on tricks, for throwing socks, coffee cups, and whatever other objects she could get her hands on closer and closer to me until she could send something sailing so close to my face I could feel the slipstream, but it never touched my skin. My warp fields were nearly as tight as my barriers, and I could hold them like a cloak over my body.

Which was a good thing, I mused as I pressed my shin against the pole, considering how little my work uniforms left to the imagination. There was a rotation to the costumes, and you learned where you were working when you found what had been laid out for you upon arrival. Red catsuit meant you were above the central bar. A gold crop and skirt meant you were in the public alcoves, upstairs or down. The same outfit in white was the VIP section. A black uniform that was little more than underwear was for the shows that required prepurchased tickets.

Ten days after Jack forced the L8 implants into the base of my skull, a white outfit appeared in my cubby in the dressing room. Desidra scowled when she saw it, red bodysuit in hand. “How are you already in the VIP lounge?” she hissed.

“There’s a human party with a special request,” Murl snarled from his post at the door. From my only conversation with Kolyat to date, I’d learned that he was one of Aria’s lieutenants, and assigned to watch the Eclipse mole. “They’re paying extra for a human girl. So get dressed or I’ll drop you out there naked.”

Murl’s threats were effective, and I was out climbing and twisting my way around the VIP lounge’s narrow stage for an increasingly rowdy group of Alliance soldiers before Desidra had snapped the shoulders of her own uniform.

True to Jack’s warning, Aria made her look like the nurturing teachers from my primary school years. She controlled the bar with an iron fist, usually through one of her many henchmen. All the bartenders and bouncers were hers, and I was pretty sure at least two of the asari dancers were too. I learned quickly that hearing from the henchmen was what you wanted. I had yet to see Aria leave her balcony, but I’d heard stories from the other dancers of patrons flung straight through the bar to the line outside, personally hauling tardy dancers from their apartments and setting them nude in the main bar, and Zana, Afterlife’s sole quarian dancer, swore Aria shoved a rival club owner out of one of Omega’s airlocks after he offered some of the dancers more money to come work for him. Kolyat said that one was just a rumor.

I ignored the chorus of wolf whistles as I slid to the stage. Standing beyond arm’s reach, I signaled to the turian bartender that I needed a break. He nodded and sent a waitress towards my party with a fresh round of drinks. She passed me a water as I slunk away from the stage.

The soldier on the end grabbed me before I could get beyond his range. “Hey, Red, how much to show our buddy a good time?” His eyes were trailing my body, but the frequent drink refills made them unfocused. “It’s his birthday, and he’s never been with a biotic. You know how biotic sex is, don’t you honey?”

I yanked my arm away from him. “Actually, I don’t. And it’s more than you can afford.” I took a sip of my water to punctuate my sentence.

“Look, sweetheart, between all of us, we can put 50,000 credits towards a little one-on-one time for my boy here.” He gestured to the friend in question, tan with black hair, seated dead center. “And then you can say you’ve been with an N7. How many girls here can say that?”

I froze, casting my eyes towards the friend. He wasn’t wearing any insignia that indicated he was part of the Interplanetary Combatives program, but most didn’t until they’d reached N7. And I was suddenly facing the very real prospect of my cover being blown by a stupid drunk enlistee.

“Pearson, she doesn’t want to,” the birthday boy said. “Just enjoy her dancing and shut up.”

Pearson waved him off. “I’m doing this for you, man. Look, Red, just take it. This is the first time we’ve gotten him out of the Villa in months. The poor kid is desperate for some tail.”

I looked over towards the bartender. His mandible twitched and he raised his hand to his earcomm as though he was about to page upstairs. I shook my head slightly. It would be easier to get out of this without someone getting spaced.

“He can have a dance,” I said finally, setting my water on the edge of the stage. “I’m not promising anything beyond that.”

Cheers erupted from the party before me. The birthday boy slumped over but got out of his seat and followed me to the nearest private room. Once the door’s lock glowed red, he said, “You don’t have to do this, you know. I told them I didn’t want this, but they insisted.”

I sat down on the stage, dangling my legs over the end. He took a chair directly in front of me. “What do you want me to do then?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I never really do anything for my birthday. I was five when my parents died, and I just bounced through the Citadel’s foster system. Hell, the only reason I even know when it is, is because my parents always told me how it was the same day as Commander Shepard’s.”

Shit. Mom’s birthday. What were she and Dad doing for it? Were they doing anything, or was she still sitting in the dark, staring out over the Strip as though it wasn’t there? Even when Ravi or I couldn’t make it home, we always called.

And my birthday, according to Ashley Ward’s identification.

“Get dancing,” Murl’s voice whispered in my earcomm, “or we’ll replace you with another girl. I don’t care how many credits they’re putting down.”

I pulled myself up. “I’ve got to do something for you or they’ll trade me out with another dancer.”

He held out his hands. “No, please. I told my friends I wasn’t interested in asari because I thought it would change their minds about buying me a stripper.” He leaned back in the chair. “But I don’t want you to get thrown out.”

I set my hand on the pole. “What’s your name?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him start. “Is…is that normal?”

“No,” I said slowly. “But I thought you’d want someone to wish you a happy birthday. Someone who cares about what you want.”

“My name’s Elliott.”

I nodded and started climbing again. “Well, Elliott. Happy Birthday.”

“Thank you…?”

“Ashley.”

“Thank you, Ashley.”


	12. Chapter 12

The afternoon after I gave Elliott his private show, Desidra was a ball of anxiety. She whirled back and forth across our meager square footage, absently hovering objects in her wake. But she refused to answer my repeated queries as to what was bothering her.

Her perceived stress increased when Murl grabbed my arm as we entered the dancers’ dressing room. “Not you today, human.”

“I did what you asked me,” I said, tugging my arm and trying to free it from his grip, but the batarian was stronger. All four eyes were trained on me. “You’re not seriously telling me that Aria isn’t happy with 50,000 credits for a dance that would have been appropriate for pre-schoolers?”

Murl snorted. “Aria doesn’t give a shit. But you’re not dancing today. We have a guest that doesn’t want to see any non-asari on the stage, and Aria is willing to honor that.”

He let go of my arm and I rubbed the red print on my bicep. I always bruised easily, and that would be a difficult one to cover. “So, what am I supposed to do? If I don’t work, I don’t have a place to sleep tonight.” That was close enough to true. Most of the credits I brought in at Afterlife went straight to Aria. I got paid just enough for my half of the efficiency I shared with Desidra and to afford some staples. Most of my meals were nutrient paste, since it was cheaper than any human sustenance imported from the Terminus colonies, let alone the Citadel or Earth.

“We can always use more waitresses.” I looked around the room, taking stock of the asari dressing around me. The Sinya sisters were both dressed in black. Great. A ticketed show. Desidra shimmied into her gold uniform, somewhat relieved to not be above the bar for a night. Murl handed me a simple black cocktail dress. Message received.

I was out before the dancers, ferrying drink orders around the upper level as patrons filled in. Drinks in the VIP lounge cost double during a Sinya Sisters show; of course, if you could afford the tickets, you likely didn’t care. But it still drew a rush in the main part of the club. I relied on my biotics to keep the trays upright and to push patrons out of my way.

Raz flagged me down. “These go to Aria,” he said, setting two highball glasses and a freshly-opened bottle of scotch on my tray. A path between his bar and the stairs to Aria’s balcony opened, as though parted by some unknown force. Or more likely one of Aria’s dozens of henchmen. Raz slipped a chit into my free hand. “You’re doing fine, human. Keep this pace up and you’ll make more in tips than you do dancing.”

I considered the one-eyed turian’s words as I made my way through to Aria. Murl was one of her personal guards for the night and admitted me without even a single glance of recognition.

Aria wasn’t alone, for once. A dark purple asari, clad in a gold evening gown, was sprawled out on the expansive leather couch. Aria was visibly avoiding looking at her. “You really need to hire better waitresses, pet,” the dark asari said. “We called for this bottle nearly ten minutes ago.”

I set the tray down and Aria dismissed me with a wave. “It’s nearly showtime, Jona. Everyone puts in at least two rounds of orders before they get shepherded into the VIP room.”

I managed to hold my surprise until I was nearly at the stairwell again when the bottle sailed past my head and shattered on the pillar next to me. “What the hell, Aria?”

Murl caught my eye and tilted his head back out to the bar, an indication that I should keep moving. I couldn’t catch Aria’s response over the nightclub’s din. The maintenance bots had already popped out of their tunnels beneath the floor to wipe away the broken glass and spilled liquor and within seconds it was as though the scotch never existed.

Raz refilled my tray as soon as I reached him, forcing out the last rounds before the doors to the VIP room sealed shut. The show may have started, but I barely noticed a drop in the crowd or the pace of orders. Glasses filled and emptied, or shattered on the floor just to be swept away by bots, credits passed from chit to chit, and the club pulsed around me. The lighting shifted from red to purple and back again and the tips grew steadily more generous as the night pressed on. Checking my running tally, I cursed Bailey for making me a dancer instead of a waitress; in just one evening ferrying drinks, I’d made enough to cover my rent. And there were still hours to go.

“Hey! Drink Girl!” Human hands closed around my arm. “I’m sick of asari. How about you jump up there and give us a show?” The man’s breath stank of partially-metabolized alcohol, sweet and sharp at the same time.

I tried to shake free but his grip on my bicep tightened. The tray slid from my hands and I barely had time to throw up a warp field to catch it. The field grabbed the glasses, violent purple ryncol and sparkling shard wine sloshing along the crystal rims, but the tray clattered to the floor, drawing the gaze of the patrons around me. A few tried to reach from the levitating beverages, as though it was a free-for-all. 

“Get off me.” I cast my head around towards the onlookers. “And don’t touch those if you haven’t paid for them.”

The man pulled me closer. “If you don’t want to get up on the stage, you can show me at home.” His vision was unfocused; while he was clearly trying to look me over, it seemed that the message hadn’t quite made it to his eyes. 

The crowd around me was too thick to catch Raz’s attention, or any of Aria’s well-placed lackeys, and they were unwilling to step in. Why should they? I was the help, a means for obtaining another drink, a vehicle for decreasing sobriety and increasing desire. 

I clenched my fist yanked my arm again. “I said  _ let go. _ ” The pull of my arm was accompanied by the other thing Jack drilled into me both at Grissom and on Pinnacle: a shockwave with the combined force of my bodyweight and my entire biotic strength. It meant dropping the glasses, casting shards and splashing liquor onto the floor around us, pushing the crowd backwards. But it also meant that Mr. Handsy suddenly found himself flung against the doors leading out into Omega’s streets, which obligingly slid open as his omnitooled hand made contact with the steel panels.

The club was oddly silent, or as silent as it could be with music still pulsing in the background. But the endless chatter, the stomp of dancers’ heels, the thrum of bodies pressing against each other had all stopped. And suddenly, above it all, a slow clap. I turned to see the crowd parting behind me, revealing Jona Sederis nodding approvingly as her hands came together. Aria pushed past us, making her way to my flung customer, clearly planning to further remove him from Afterlife, and possibly introducing him to the real thing, depending on how he reacted.

“Well, well,” Jona said as she came level with me, taking care to avoid the floor-bound bots as they swept and mopped around us. “It sure is impressive what you humans have managed to do with your biotics, isn’t it?”

Thank God I didn’t have anything else to drop. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Desidra reaching for my lost tray, pulling it into the crowd and away from Jona’s--or more likely, Aria’s--sight. “I’m sorry?”

“Human biotics tend to look like they’re fumbling with wet paper,” Jona said. She extended her violet arm, weaving her fingers through my hair and resting one lightly on the edge of my amp port. “It’s been years since I’ve seen one who can actually handle herself.”

During one of our school vacations in Rio, Ravi and I found a snake staring down a mouse, waiting for the moment to strike it and claim its meal. In that moment, Jona’s hand grazing the back of my head, Afterlife’s crowd frozen around us, I was that mouse, every cell in my body screaming danger. I was prey and my body knew it. 

Jona dropped her hand when Aria reappeared at her side. “Run along, little human,” she said, her cloying voice laced with venom. Or maybe I imagined it.

I looked to Aria. She waved her hand dismissively. “Get out of here.”

“But--”

“Leave, before I change my mind.” She turned and headed back towards her balcony. Jona cast one more appraising glance my way before following. I ducked into the reforming crowd, not bothering to find Raz to approve my credit transfers for the night or to reclaim my street clothes from my locker. All of my nerves were on stinging edges, shrieking to be released from the club.

I didn’t make it two steps out the door before I heard someone calling my name. Elliott was flagging me down from a position near the front of the line, but ducked under the lightrope when I looked towards him. “What happened in there?”

I shook my head, waving him off. “A customer got too friendly. I’ll be fine. You can go on inside.” I signaled the elcor bouncer, gesturing to where Elliott had been standing, his vacant position now filled by the next guest hoping to make it through the door.

“Actually, I came to see you,” he said. A faint blush crept across his face.

I tried to raise one eyebrow, but could feel both creeping towards my hairline. Dammit. “You were going to pay a four hundred credit cover just to say hello?”

“Um.” Elliott cast his head around, his brown hair falling into his face.

I shook my head and took his hand, leading him to the street. I signaled for a skycab and tried to conceal my surprise when a car with seashell decals descended in front of us. “Let’s get out of here. You can buy me coffee.”


	13. Chapter 13

Kolyat delivered us to a cafe not far from the apartment I shared with Desidra. After he pulled away, Elliott looked down at his credit chit and frowned. “Looks like sharing a planet with the hanar makes drell evangelists too.” He passed me the prayer card that Kolyat had tucked in with the chit.

I looked down at the card. 

_ “‘Kalahira, wash the sins from this one and set him on the distant shore of the infinite spirit. This one’s heart is pure but beset by wickedness and contention. Guide this one to where the traveler never tires, the lover never leaves, the hungry never starve. Guide this one, Kalahira, and he will be a companion to you as he was to me.’”  _

Looking back at Elliott, I added, “at least it’s a nice prayer.”

“I could do without the judgement,” Elliott said, gesturing towards the cafe’s door. “Just because I wear Alliance tags doesn’t mean I’m a terrible person.”

“I don’t think it’s that,” I said as I passed through. The cafe’s white lights felt sterile after the purples and reds of Afterlife. “The galaxy is a rough place. Anyone who thinks they’re doing right could be considered wicked by someone else.” Even Mom, Savior of the Galaxy, was reviled by some groups. 

A tired-looking human waitress set two mugs in front of us and filled them to the brim with steaming coffee before either of us had a chance to ask. This was that sort of place, catering to those who worked Omega’s long and twilight hours, whose need for caffeine was assumed. I took a deep breath, inhaling the aroma. After a month on Pinnacle, human coffee felt like a luxury again.

Once I’d taken a few sips, I looked back up at Elliott. He was staring resolutely at his mug. “Your buddy said you’re an N7? What’s that like?”

Elliott blushed again. “I’m not an N7 yet.” He finally looked up at me. His eyes matched his hair, both brown and nearly as dark as the coffee before us. “There’s a lot you have to go through before they give you the title.”

I knew that, but I let him go on for a while, savoring the coffee and accepting a refill as the waitress passed by again. I got to hear about Rio and the N7 training through the eyes of someone who actually had to deal with the 20-hour days and only longed for the beach mere steps from the academy’s doors. When he mentioned Mom, it was with the respect of a soldier for his superior officer, not Finch’s starry-eyed reverence. 

“What about you?” Elliott said finally, draining his cup. “You don’t sound like you grew up on Omega.”

I shrugged. “I’m not from anywhere, really.”

“What about family?”

I’d had time to practice this, but now that the question was in front of me, the lies seemed impossible. Better for a vague truth. I set my mug on the table. “Mom. Dad. Twin brother.” Well, sort of. Ravi and I were less than a month apart, when you accounted for the calendar adjustments between Palaven and Earth, and the convergence math that the Citadel used to make everything uniform. “I came here to get away from my parents.” Hesitating, I added, “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

Elliott nodded. “It’s hard.” He waved the waitress down for another refill, even though I’d drank less than half of my current portion. “I just like hearing about other peoples’ families. My parents died during the war, so I didn’t really have one growing up.” His omnitool trilled with an incoming message. He scanned the text, the words obscured in an Alliance encryption pattern that I recognized but wasn’t able to break before he dismissed the screen. “I’ve got to go,” he said. He tapped the screen on his omnitool a few times. “I’ve covered you for a few more cups if you need them.”

“You don’t have to--”

He smiled, probably the first real smile I’d seen out of him, cautious and shy. “Don’t worry about it. Consider it my way of apologizing for my asshole squadmates yesterday.”

I set the drell prayer card on the table, centered between Elliott’s abandoned mug and my own. His empty seat barely had time to grow cold before Kolyat slid into the banquette across from me. “Not the most private setting,” he remarked.

“You gave me the card,” I said, picking it up again and handing it back. “It never said anything about ‘wait until you’re somewhere completely alone’.” I waved my hand around the busy cafe, the door constantly opening and closing, waitresses shuffling between patrons. “Besides, who’s even going to hear us over this mess?”

Kolyat sighed and flipped the card between his webbed fingers. “You have a lot to learn about operational security, but you’re not completely wrong.”

“You had information for me?”

He nodded and set the card back on the table. “Jona Sederis --”

I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “I know. I already met her.”

“Let me finish.” While his cadence was still smooth and lyrical, Kolyat’s tone was irritated. I pursed my lips, feeling shame course through me. We were light-years from the Citadel and almost entirely cut off from C-Sec resources, but Kolyat was still my superior. “Jona Sederis arrived here last night and made contact with her mole in Afterlife.” His inner eyelids blinked as his gaze drilled into me. “A Miss Desidra M’toli.”

I groaned. “I feel like I should have figured that out on my own.”

“I didn’t expect you to.” Kolyat nodded at the waitress as she passed our table again. She set down a chipped mug and began to fill it. Once she was gone, he continued, “Aria lacks subtlety. I had a feeling she’d put the agent directly in front of you.”

And yet I didn’t notice. I thought back to Murl’s constant presence on our shifts, Desidra’s frustration with never being assigned to any of the premium or private spaces,  and her visible anxiety earlier that day. Of course she was the Eclipse agent. I was just too thick to realize it.

“There is also the matter of the Intraplanetary Operative,” Kolyat continued. He wasn’t drinking the coffee, just holding the mug between his hands. “I do not have access to the proper channels to identify what Captain Morales is doing here--”

“The Alliance has no presence out here,” I reminded him. “Elliott’s on shore leave, like all the other Alliance soldiers on this godforsaken asteroid. They’re here for gambling, ass, and cheap liquor before they spend six months on a freighter.”

Kolyat continued to stare at me until I realized I’d interrupted him again. Shit.

“Focus on Sederis,” he said finally. “You already have her attention, thanks to your little stunt in Afterlife a few hours ago -- and before you ask, yes I know about that. You aren’t the only person I talk to on Omega. She’s looking for something, so I imagine she’ll be here a while. You should have plenty of opportunity to get into her good graces.”

"Thanks," I muttered. Kolyat started to rise, pulling a credit chit from his pocket. "Interesting choice of prayer, by the way," I added before he could turn to leave.

He nodded. His vision suddenly seemed as though it was far away. "It was a favorite of my father's, and one he used for those he was close to. It felt appropriate to pass on to you."


	14. Chapter 14

“We should get away this weekend,” Desidra said, peeling the metallic red jumpsuit to her waist. “A girlfriend of mine is having a party this weekend in Nos Astra.”

My eyebrows crept up my forehead. I tried to force one of them downwards but the mirror behind Desidra showed I was only succeeding at wrinkling my nose. I sighed in frustration. “Illium’s expensive.” 

She slid one leg out. Her purple skin shone with sweat. “Yeah, but a barge shuttle’s 150 credits and we can stay with her. It would be fun to get off this rock.” She glanced through the tinted glass window that looked over Omega’s endless levels. “Maybe see some real sky for a change.”

I couldn’t fault her for that. The asteroid was massive, but it was just that. It had the same artificial environment as the Citadel, but it was a perpetual night, backlit with a faint red glow that I couldn’t get used to.

“When do you want to leave?”

Desidra pulled up her omnitool and flicked through the extranet screens. “The next barge shuttle to Nos Astra is in two hours.”

“What?” I stared at her in dismay. 

“Neither of us is scheduled opposite the Sinya Sisters, and some traveling circus group is coming through after that. We’ve got nearly 75 hours before we have to come back here.” She tugged my arm. “Come  _ on _ . It’ll be fun. We’ll get drunk, explore the city, spend too much money on clothes, and be back in time to shake our tits at more wasted turians.” Desidra glanced pointedly at the door leading to the bar, alluding to the bachelor party we’d just spent the last hour entertaining.

I zipped up my jacket and popped the hood over my hair. I was frantically calculating how I was going to reach Kolyat. “I don’t have anything to wear to a party.” It was true. Most of my earnings from Afterlife went to keeping myself alive, but I’d managed to throw together a passable wardrobe. I was doing much more laundry than I would have preferred.

“You can borrow something of mine,” Desidra said dismissively. She was now fully clothed and linked her arm through my own. “Just throw an overnight bag together and I’ll take care of the rest.”

We pushed our way out into Omega’s endless nightlife. I pulled up my omnitool’s clock, showing that it was nearly 0400. Our normally short walk to the apartment was made even faster by Desidra’s eagerness to get moving. Her nerves had subsided over the last two weeks, after Jona finally left, and I’d been watching her more critically, trying to find some hint of a sign that she was planning something, or acting on someone else’s plans. But she’d continued to be snippy with Murl over her assignments. In fact, the only difference was her marked interest in my biotic abilities. Mostly levitating drinks through Afterlife while we were on breaks, but she’d also taken to hauling the alarm clock at me in the apartment. After the first time, I started throwing it back without even rolling over.

Desidra was a whirlwind of activity once we reached the apartment, throwing things into bags, holding cocktail dresses up against me before discarding them on her bed, all the while muttering to herself. 

“So who’s party is this?” I asked casually, elbowing Kolyat’s shell into the window. I was pretty sure I saw his cab drive past us while we walked home. 

“Just an old friend,” Desidra said dismissively. “She’s about to get a pretty big promotion I guess, so she’s throwing a party for herself. Sounds like she’s planning on taking over one of the bars near the trading floor.”

I glanced out the window again. Kolyat was kneeling next to his cab, examining the exhaust vents. Desidra pressed another dress against me. “Perfect,” she announced, pulling back to reveal the black and silver-striped sheath. She glanced out the window behind me. “Excellent. Let’s grab that cab before someone else does.”

She chattered away as we headed down the stairs and back into the street, hopping into the back of Kolyat’s cab without even asking if it was in service. He nodded curtly at me before I slid in next to her. Desidra ordered him to the spaceport and began flipping through messages on her datapad.

I waved my roommate on ahead pretending to struggle with the cabs credit transfer system. “We’re going to Illium.”

Kolyat nodded, keeping his gaze forward and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “I thought as much. My contacts there suggest that the Eclipse is making a move.”

I frowned. “We’re just going for a party.”

“Perhaps.” Kolyat leaned against the headrest and reached out for my credit chit. “But keep your eyes open. I can’t help you there -- there’s only one drell in all of Nos Astra, and everyone there knows him.”

“Who is he?”

Kolyat shook his head. “His name won’t mean anything to you and he is not a friend. Focus on your mission. Learn as much as you can and I’ll find you when you get back.” He handed back the chit.

I slid out of the car and wove through the streams of people at the spaceport. Desidra was next to the ticket stand, tapping her foot impatiently. She held out her hand as I drew near, gesturing for my omnitool arm. “I got your ticket,” she said, waving her tool over my own. My palm tingled as the ticket data transferred. “Pay me back when your chit works.”

“It works now,” I said and made the credit transfer. “The cab’s software must have been pre-war.”

“Nothing is pre-war,” Desidra said, dragging me through. “Some EMP wiped out literally all the tech in the galaxy for months. It took for-fucking-ever to get back.” She rolled her eyes. “I was stuck on Nevos for ages.”

“What’s on Nevos?”

“Nothing important, which was the point,” Desidra sounded exasperated. “Everyone on Thessia who could afford it sent their daughters there to get away from the Reapers. The spaceport got taken out but otherwise it was pretty safe. And boring.”

I studied Desidra. I was awful at guessing asari age. “You’re what, a hundred?”

She snorted. “Eighty-five. Which is why i got shunted out here to Omega instead of doing anything really fun.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. The barge pulled up to its slip in the port and we headed towards it, joining a long line of asari.

Desidra smiled. “You’ll see when we get to Illium.”

Just what I was going to see wasn’t explained, and I soon forgot about it as we settled into the barge’s economy seating. Desidra and I bickered for a while over what to watch on our seats’ shared data screen, before finally settling on a biotiball match. I winced slightly when it flicked on: Rio was playing against Armali. 

“Appropriate,” Desidra chuckled, leaning back into her seat. “Humans against asari. Of course, this will be a bloodbath. The Lake Sirens haven’t lost a match yet this year.”

I sighed. Rio never did well. Dad once declared that the South American team may as well have turians on it for all their biotic abilities, after a particularly crushing defeat on the Citadel.

Desidra pulled a file out of her bag and began smoothing a ragged nail. “You’re pretty good for a human, you know?”

“So I’ve heard,” I muttered, remembering Jona Sederis’s sarcastic slow clap.

A smirk grew on her face. “I think she liked you.”  Desidra raised her hand to examine the offending digit. “We’ll have some time to kill before we can get into my friend’s apartment. How do you feel about hitting the Arena?”

I cast a sideways glance at her. She continued to file, shaping her other fingers and didn’t elaborate. I simply shrugged and tried to settle back into the seat as the public address system announced the mass relay approach.

 


End file.
